By Alym Rayani, MBA
Alym Rayani (arayani@microsoft.com) is general manager of Compliance for Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington, USA.
The challenges compliance and governance professionals face today may feel insurmountable—and for good reason. Like many things these days, the regulatory landscape is shifting rapidly and dramatically. In the United States, for example, data privacy regulation is a hodgepodge of 36 laws varying by state. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom is in talks of developing its own data regulation standards apart from the General Data Protection Regulation, while China and India are creating their privacy regulations from the ground up. Further, some highly regulated industries see upwards of 257 new or updated regulations per day.[1] With the latest data privacy having been enacted in China in August 2021, most of the world’s population will soon have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations.
So it is no surprise that managing regulatory responsibilities with all those laws in mind is often manual, time-consuming, and expensive for organizations.
Compliance and governance professionals are doing all they can to keep up—knowing this work is critical to safeguarding our data and privacy and protecting the tools needed to stay connected, get work done, and thrive in our global digital economy. Though 66% of compliance professionals list privacy audits as a priority, many are expected to go at it on their own using manual processes.[2] This system weighs organizations down in time and cost, is prone to error, and prevents compliance professionals from tackling more rewarding challenges.
